Gay Talese called Toots Shor’s “the first sport’s restaurant.” It was where the ballplayers and boxers went to celebrate a victory or forget a defeat. Its bar was often so crowded with athletes and sportswriters—and visitors gawking at the stars—that it was difficult for a newcomer to get a drink. Yogi Berra reportedly once observed, “Toots Shor’s is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.” Yogi’s opinion notwithstanding, for the sports crowd it was the place to be. “What you have to understand is that Toots was the pivotal character in New York. Everything revolved around him,” said Talese. “His place was the celebrity hangout, like Sardi’s is for the theater crowd and Elaine’s is for the writers.” And although it was a public place where athletes and sportswriters mixed, the next day’s papers did not report what athletes said and did in Toots Shor’s.22
As far as Toots was concerned, sport was America’s civic religion, and the most celebrated athletes were the nation’s high priests. One observer commented, “Shor believes that sports are the backbone of American life and that good citizenship demands a close interest in them.” Athletes’ youth and virility, grace under pressure, and competitive drive underscored the strengths of the country, then locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. How could anything be wrong with America, he reasoned, when the Yankees ruled baseball and Rocky Marciano dominated the heavyweight division?23
DiMaggio proved his case. Even after he retired, Joe was the unofficial king of Toots Shor’s. Years after the Yankee Clipper left the game, Toots ranked him as one of the ten most important living men, right up there with Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. “DiMaggio always got a premier table at Toots Shor’s,” noted Jack Lang, “right in the front.” When Joe showed up with Marilyn Monroe it was the equivalent of a royal appearance. Of course, their presence also made clear that there was no saloon in the city like Toots Shor’s. No place in America—or the world, for that matter—more consistently attracted celebrities. Shor could be excused for beaming at the constellation of stars that nightly appeared at 51 West 51st Street. For that reason he never bothered to advertise his establishment. He knew that the columnists and celebrity photographers would give him all the free publicity he desired.24
A celebrity’s standing often determined his opinion of Toots. For those at the summit of their profession, he was “as kind as Saint Francis of Assisi, as generous as Santa Claus, as worldly as [financier] Bernard Baruch, and as understanding as [famed advice columnist] Dorothy Dix.” For them he was the gruff but genial host, his rough exterior covering his soft heart. But his detractors were as harsh as his supporters were generous. “He’s a slob with delusions of grandeur,” commented one. “When his friends are batting three-fifty, Toots can’t do enough for them. Then they’re real, solid-gold crumb bums. But when they start hitting two hundred, something happens to Toots’s eyesight—he can’t see the old pals so good anymore.”25
His eyesight was twenty-twenty when it came to the 1950s Yankees, especially Mantle. Shor admired and respected DiMaggio, but usually at a safe distance. Their affection was undoubtedly genuine, but like everyone else Toots was careful not to get too familiar with the aloof, often moody Clipper. DiMaggio was always uncomfortable with his public. Like a marble statue, he commanded respect but was apt to be cold. In contrast, Mickey was a lovable kid, a big, smiling puppy of a man. When he came into the bar, Toots always hurried over and hugged him, sometimes spilling a little of his brandy and soda on Mantle’s jacket, which only made Mickey laugh more. “God, Toots loved Mickey. And vice versa,” Whitey Ford remembered. “He was closest to Mickey. He would hug Mick. He couldn’t hug Joe.”26
The Yankees received the best of everything—Shor’s biggest smile, his finest tables, his best liquor. Mantle, Martin, Ford, Bauer, Berra, and other Yankees Dead End Kids were regulars. They dropped by during off days and following afternoon games and even showed up for nightcaps after playing under the lights. Baseball lore is rife with stories about heavy-drinking major leaguers—from Babe Ruth’s frequent bellyaches to hungover Hack Wilson losing a ground ball in the sun—but, as one authority on the subject wrote, “this hard-drinking world reached it apotheosis in New York… during the 1950s when Mickey Mantle, young and vibrant, was the biggest star in the brightest constellation in the baseball firmament.”27
For Mantle, professional baseball players, and millions of other Americans, booze was the drug of choice in the 1950s. At the time, a “problem drinker” was not a man who drank too much but one who couldn’t hold his liquor. When Mickey and “the boys”—the very designation is telling—ventured out for a night of fun at Toots Shor’s they intended to drink heavily. They followed Toot’s personal philosophy: “Drink, certainly, and drink a lot, but hold it.” The argot of Toots Shor’s was part of a national idiom. A person who was drunk but holding it was “loaded” or had “a load on.” But a patron could also be “half loaded,” “three-quarter loaded,” “winged,” or “bouncing.” None of that mattered, except if the drinker slid past “loaded” to “sloppy.” A sloppy drunk—mawkish or aggressively belligerent—was an embarrassment and unwelcome at Toots’s.28
This culture of drink transcended Toots Shor’s and baseball. In the publishing industry it was the decade of the three-martini lunch, a time when the most important business was completed early in the day. In white-collar professions it was common to take a prospective employee out to lunch. If he didn’t drink, he didn’t get the job. If he drank too much and became “sloppy,” he didn’t get the job. If he got “half-loaded” but showed no signs of wear, he had a good shot at whatever position he was up for—that is, if anyone could remember after the midday binge. The main difference between white- and blue-collar drinking was not the quantity but the brand of booze. On Wall Street and Madison Avenue they drank Scotch, bourbon, vodka, and gin. In Astoria and Brooklyn, beer was the beverage of choice.
In the world of professional baseball, drinking was part of the daily rhythm of life. Big-league players spent most of their days waiting for a game to begin and dealing with long stretches of boredom. So they turned to the bottle. They drank on the road, in the bar cars during lengthy train rides, during low-stakes poker games, and at late-night bull sessions. They drank in bars while they trolled for one-night stands or just engaged in some “innocent” flirting. They drank beers in the clubhouse after games. Normally Pete Previte, the clubhouse assistant who, when he was younger, had brought hot dogs to Babe Ruth and coffee to Joe DiMaggio, made sure that there were cold beers for Mickey and the Yankees to sip as they unwound after a contest. Often after victories Casey Stengel paid for the beer. Drinking made them feel like winners.29
It was like the old joke: “If you avoid the bottle, don’t overeat, save your money, go to bed and arise early, you will live longer—or at least it will seem a hell of a lot longer.” Mickey, Billy, and the rest did not aspire to long lives of asceticism. At the plate Mickey swung for the fences. Away from Yankee Stadium he lived the same way—drinking hard, ignoring curfews, and behaving as if he were a bachelor.
If some players drank to escape boredom, others drank out of fear. Theirs was a precarious profession. Most knew that they would be forced out of the game in their thirties, if not earlier. And it could all end in the blink of an eye. A pitcher might tear a rotator cuff on one fastball. A fielder might stumble and “blow out” a knee beyond the limited skills and knowledge of surgeons at the time. A slightly below-average batter might go into a slump and simply be replaced by a promising minor leaguer. In the mid-1950s the Yankees had second baseman Bobby Richardson and shortstop Tony Kubek in their farm system. Young, talented, and fresh faced, they were waiting for the opportunity to replace Billy Martin and Gil McDougald, respectively. It could and would happen. Every Yankee knew the popular legend of Wally Pipp—the outstanding first baseman who sat out one game with a headache and was replaced by some kid named Lou Gehrig. Pipp never got his job back. Maybe the details of the story were apocryphal. Perhaps manager
Miller Huggins was punishing him for gambling or had lost confidence in his hitting against left-handed pitchers. It hardly mattered. The essential story line was correct: here one day, gone the next. None of Mantle’s teammates wanted to be the next Wally Pipp.
Added to all this was the code in the big leagues: “Drink hard, play hard.” Drinking and playing baseball defined a major-league man. Mickey Mantle epitomized this ideal of red-blooded masculinity. The stories of Mantle showing up at the ballpark bleary-eyed with a hangover—or still half loaded—and blasting a home run are staples in the folklore of the game. “Shit,” Mickey would say, “the home runs weren’t nothin’. Now, runnin’ them damn bases was a killer.” That was big league, Babe Ruth stuff. Legend material. Ryne Duren, a former Yankee whose career was cut short by alcoholism, understood the deeper ties between baseball and the bottle: “Alcohol is tied to masculinity—the more you drink, the better man you are.”30
In 1956, as his incredible start to the season suggested he might break Ruth’s single-season home run record, Mickey Mantle was simply the best. Digging in at the plate, swaggering into Toots Shor’s, or ducking into a woman’s hotel room, he was the heir apparent to Babe. “If you could drink all night, get the girl, get up the next day, and hit a home run, you passed the test,” he recalled. “Temptations were everywhere. Fans would buy us drinks [and] girls would hang around to meet us.” Unfortunately, Mickey was better at passing the test than resisting temptations. Not that he tried very hard. He had a code to uphold. “In those days, how well you could hold your liquor was, for many of us, a measure of being a man. At the ballpark, you belted them out. At the bar, you belted them down.” That was the way he played—and the way he lived.31
THE YANKEES NEEDED Mantle to be at the top of his game. At home they dropped two of three to Cleveland and split four against Baltimore. Though they were still in first place on May 13, their lead had shrunk to a single game. Casey Stengel admitted that he didn’t know what to do with the infield. Billy Martin was hitting under .200, Andy Carey and Gil McDougald weren’t much better, and they were committing too many errors. “I can’t understand it. They’re out there practicin’,” Stengel told reporters. “Yet they’re makin’ bad plays and I don’t know what it is but I’ll tell you it better get better.” To instill some fear into the miscreants, he inserted twenty-year-old Bobby Richardson in the lineup for Martin at second. It was his Wally Pipp–Lou Gehrig moment, but Richardson failed to deliver and was promptly shipped off to the Yank’s Denver farm team.32
In the 1950s, the most famous athletes went to Toots Shor’s to drink and socialize when in New York. The saloonkeeper welcomed them with open arms and treated them like family. Pictured from left to right: golfer Jimmy Demeret, Mantle, Shor, fellow restaurateur Ed Wynn, and boxer Rocky Graziano. Courtesy of Getty Images.
As the team prepared for a twelve-game road swing through the West, it was an open question whether they could continue to count on the bats of Mantle and Berra. Yogi was tough and dependable, but he was outperforming his career statistics by a long way. If he reverted to form, his batting average would fall slightly below .300 and his home run pace would falter. Although he already had ten homers, he had never hit more than thirty in a season. Mickey was more mercurial. He was capable of reaching unimagined heights, or he might stub a toe or wreck a knee. The uncertainty unsettled Stengel and George Weiss, leading them to question what they had and to look to make changes.33
New York Post writer Jerry Mitchell judged that the team’s “dreams of quick conquest [had] broken into small pieces.” Stengel had loaded his squad with right-handed hitters to match up with teams like the Indians that had talented southpaw pitchers. But the Yankee right-handers were popping up, hitting into double plays, and striking out. “Pitiful,” their manager remarked. The thought of an extended road trip with a squad of light hitters sat poorly with Professor Stengel.34
On May 14 Cleveland’s Bob Lemon tossed a three-hit victory against the Yankees, despite Mantle’s fourth-inning home run. The win gave the Indians a small lead in the pennant race. Two days later, on a cold, windy Wednesday, fewer than 7,000 spectators watched as New York regained its one game margin. It was Billy Martin’s birthday, and fittingly enough he broke out of a slump. Leading off in the first inning, he drove the ball over the left-field fence for his first home run of the season. Mickey hit a home run in the seventh. It was his thirteenth of the year.35
The Yankees’ win and Martin’s birthday home run were cause for a mild celebration. Had they been in New York, Martin, Ford, and Mantle would have closed down Toots Shor’s, but they weren’t in Manhattan. And, Mantle later noted, “how are you going to have a real celebration in Cleveland?” They settled for dinner and a few drinks to toast Billy. Their activities were as uneventful as the following year’s birthday bash would prove life changing.36
The win also brought an end to the Yankees’ early-season doldrums. As if by some magic, Martin started to hit, draw walks, and score runs. His swagger returned, and with it, his team’s imperial dominance. They scored twenty-four runs during a three-game sweep in Chicago and knocked in twelve more in two wins against Kansas City. Then, after losing a one-run game to Detroit, they took the next two in the series 13–5 and 11–4. The Yanks finished the road trip splitting two games with Baltimore, having won nine of twelve. Once again, they owned the American League.
The team was as arrogant as it was dominant. In the eighth inning in a game in Kansas City, the Royals’ manager, Lou Boudreau, sent in relief pitcher Tommy Lasorda. Lasorda proceeded to throw high and tight. He “shaved” Hank Bauer in the eighth and then struck him out looking. He used the same tactic against Martin in the ninth. Hitless for the day, Billy retuned to the dugout hot. “I’m going to get you later,” he screamed at Lasorda.37
The stocky pitcher took a step toward New York’s dugout, challenging him: “You don’t have to wait, banana nose, come out now.”
Martin didn’t need a second invitation. He led as Bauer and several other Yankees charged toward the mound. A reporter suggested that “a general riot threatened,” but in truth the umpires quickly restored order, and the game finished without further incident. But to be on the safe side, Casey Stengel left the field carrying a bat. It was a clear indication that he approved of Martin’s behavior. Fighting showed Stengel that a player was taking an interest in the game. Winners battled, and Martin, no matter how disliked by George Weiss, was a winner. As was often the case, he ignited the entire team.
During the road swing, Mickey used his bat at the plate, not like Stengel to get off the field. He hit his fourteenth and fifteenth homers in an afternoon game against the White Sox, the first right-handed and the second left-handed. Few batters had ever accomplished the feat; Mantle had now done it twice. Both shots traveled over four hundred feet into the upper decks of Comiskey Park. And he hit the second homer in the ninth inning with his team down by one. The Yankees won the game in the tenth.38
Beat writer Harold Rosenthal commented that the performance raised Mickey’s batting average to “a giddy .409.” It was Homeric—Mighty Casey, Roy Hobbs, the Great Bambino heroics. The Yankees, hated in every American League city, were not America’s team, but twenty-four-year-old Mickey Mantle was fast becoming America’s baseball player. Fans around the circuit applauded his feats. In Chicago and Detroit they booed their own pitchers for walking the slugger. “There hasn’t been such mass indignation over a batter not being given a chance to hit since the days of Babe Ruth,” suggested Jerry Mitchell. Spectators in several cities appeared more interested in seeing Mickey hit one out of their park than watching their team win. With Mantle at the plate, a competitive baseball game took on the air of an exhibition.39
Even John Franklin “Home Run” Baker, the symbol of hitting power in the era before the Great War, was caught in the Mantle craze. Mickey, he said, “finally has found himself.” He was a transcendent slugger. Baker predicted that Mantle would break Ruth’s recor
d and “put the home run mark clear out of sight,” adding, “There’s no limit to what that young man just might do.”40
The opinions about Mantle’s future solidified into a consensus. A drawing in the New York World-Telegram and Sun pictured Mantle’s swing in full extension. Below a large “Ruth’s 60 Homers,” the artist added two smaller lines: “Homer No. ___ for Mantle” and “Now ___ Games Ahead of Ruth’s Pace.” As the illustrator explains to the copy boy, “See? You just fill in the right numbers… and you can run this on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Baseball had long been about “the right numbers,” but in May 1956 Americans converted Mantle’s glorious performance into a dogged pursuit of the home run record. It wasn’t the Yankees versus the other teams of the American League or even Mantle against American League pitchers. The season was now about Mickey versus the Babe’s ghost, a race between the “Wonder Boy” and the peerless legend who had died in 1948.41
Even Jimmy Cannon, whose attachment to Joe DiMaggio was so great that he always seemed to be secretly rooting against Mantle in the apparent belief that the young star’s success somehow diminished the Yankee Clipper’s brilliance, reluctantly joined the stampede. “This appears to be the year when Mickey Mantle will cross the frontier and pass into the country of greatness,” he wrote.42
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